Chinaberry Sidewalks (13 page)

His mother and mine were the first to converge on him in Mr. Carnew’s front yard. “Ricky shot me! He shot me!” Dabbo howled through the snot and tears covering his face like Vaseline. Margie ripped open the wet tear in his blue jeans to reveal the three-inch slice from which a two-foot stream of blood now spurted with the rhythm of her son’s pounding heart.

My mother tore my T-shirt into strips for a tourniquet. Dabbo stuck his foot into the mop bucket his sister had been sent to retrieve from their house. By now a crowd had gathered around the scene, one or two of the adults unable to resist adding to the drama.

“You need to get that boy on down to the hospital ’fore he bleeds to death,” Alley Jo Chenier blurted out with characteristic insensitivity.

“Shsst,” Margie hissed. “What in the world’s wrong with you? Why you wanna scare him like that? Somebody oughta shoot a arrow into that fat mouth of yours.”

I was trying to blink away the image of my best friend dead when she and Dabbo and my mother sped off to the emergency room with his foot still in the bucket.

Crossing Norvic Street to await their return at home, I noticed Ricky skipping hurriedly away from the scene of the crime. I walked over to where his arrow rested in the middle of the street, picked it up, and called, “Hey, you forgot this.”

This was the last time I remember seeing Ricky Schmidt. Not long afterward, his family moved away. And within a year or so, my partnership with Dabbo dissolved completely when I encountered the awkwardness of junior high and a whole new set of social concerns. Despite our best efforts, the two-year age difference between us became a chasm we simply couldn’t cross.

P
ART
T
HREE

Mrs. Boyer

M
rs. Boyer’s property had a foreboding quality that scared every kid in the neighborhood. Jungle landscape and dense shadow obscured everything but the house’s front entrance. My recollections of the turn-of-the-century furnishings crammed into her dingy living room put me in mind of a poor Miss Havisham. But it was long before any of us arrived on the scene that Mrs. Boyer’s great expectations had turned to dark resignation. The atmosphere surrounding that household suggested only one thing to an otherwise curious nine-year-old: KEEP OUT.

More than any family in Jacinto City, the Boyers bore the heartbreak of World War II like a curse on the bloodline. By my mother’s account, Mrs. Boyer’s only son, an Air Force bombardier stationed in the north of England, met and married a girl from Coventry, and they had two daughters a year apart. Deeply in love and devoted to his family, it was said of Bruce Boyer that, in spite of all that was going on around him, a happier man was not to be found on British soil.

Near the end of the war, walking home from her job in a shirt factory, his wife was killed in one of the Luftwaffe’s last air raids. Grief-stricken to the point of suicide, Mr. Boyer was given a medical discharge and brought the girls home to Norvic Street, where his mother took up the task of raising them.

The Bruce Boyer I knew was a wounded animal—whip-thin, his eyes as dark as poisoned pools, his head down and shoulders hunched forward. “That man looks like a question mark to me,” my mother once said. Mr. Boyer made short work of any public outings. Along with Dabbo, I perceived danger in his sorrow and vowed to steer clear of the brooding ex-bombardier’s flight path, though this was needless self-importance on our part, as he took no interest in anything outside himself. The demons eating his insides out held him spellbound, and the real world, if indeed it actually registered with him, seemed as much a private hell as his own heart’s interior. He came and went, phantomlike, in an old Dodge panel truck.

Despite the residual shell shock hanging over their house like a nuclear winter, his daughters, Elaine and Jennifer, were adventurous spirits and quite accommodating to their nine-year-old neighbor. Thanks to them, during impromptu nurses-and-wounded-soldier games, I had occasion to feel pubescent hands travel the length and breadth of my growing body and was content to lie motionless in the cool dampness beneath the bushes next to their house while the girls took turns nursing me back to life with a thoroughness unmatched by the health professionals I’ve come across in my adult life. Free of charge, they allowed me to gaze upon their nakedness. And of course there were occasional forays into touching, once I learned to be still and allow the hormonal fruits of adolescent innocence to arrive at my door like fresh milk.

But my earliest Norvic Street memory is of the night their grandfather died, a few months after we moved in next door. At the time the Boyers were without electricity, the same on-again, off-again proposition in their household it would become in ours. The prolonged candle-lit deathwatch being held across the driveway was taking its toll on Mrs. Boyer. Given the nasty hand she’d been dealt by life’s circumstances—the worst card now being her husband’s impending death—it’s no wonder that her first appearance at our door that evening in 1956 had such a lasting effect on me.

In this story, truth and fairness are overruled by first impressions. The image burned forever into my nearly six-year-old mind of a toothless hag’s gnarly hands rap-rap-rapping on our screen door has been proven by time to be a distortion, but it must be an accurate account of what I saw. Death had made a house call to the wrong address, and I answered the door.

“Young man, are your parents home?”

No answer. I stood slack-jawed and frozen, watching the movement of her lips and hearing the words, yet words of my own would not present themselves.

“Young man,
are
your parents home?”

Her stern emphasis on the verb clearly demanded an answer, but the only response I could muster was none at all.

Then, for the third time: “Are your parents home?”

A simple enough question, had I not heard an implicit threat:
Look, you little prick, if you don’t answer me I’m going to gouge your eyeballs loose and suck your brain out through the sockets
. In response, I finally peed down the front of my short pants, apparently a coded message:
Please don’t kill me. I’m trying to cooperate, but right now only my water works
.

My mother’s hand on my shoulder broke the stalemate.

Suddenly, my vocal cords issue a deep
“Whoaah!”
that gains volume and a machine-gun vibrato that matches my pounding feet as I beat a hasty retreat to the farthest corner of my bedroom. Beneath a pile of dirty clothes, I select a more pitiful intonation to alert my mother of my whereabouts, my heart pounding hard right up to my Adam’s apple.

Undeterred by my cowardly lack of neighborliness, Mrs. Boyer came directly to the point. And my father, always effective when addressing someone else’s woes, rose to the occasion. With a mechanic’s caged lightbulb and an extension cord, he brought light from the wall socket in my room to the tiny bedroom where Old Man Boyer lay dying.

Calming me down was a long and tedious task: I attached myself to my mother’s hip with vise-grip resolve as she made sweet iced tea and sandwiches for the family next door. Due to the fit I pitched about her crossing the line separating us from a house of death, she couldn’t deliver these refreshments herself, and my father assumed the task of transporting them on a TV-dinner tray along the same line as the extension cord.

Calm enough now to be curious, I watched the drama unfolding across the driveway, where the bulb he’d hung cast a harsh yellow light into the four corners of the old man’s bedroom, but sleep claimed me before Mr. Boyer stole quietly away that June night.

Later, my mother explained what it was I’d seen the night Mrs. Boyer sent me running for cover. “Son, her nerves were so tore up, she forgot to put her teeth in and do her hair up. She didn’t even know all she had on was her housecoat when she come to the door. You’re gonna have to go on over there and tell her you’re sorry.”

I approached Mrs. Boyer in her backyard a few days later with a composed apology. “I’m sorry you scared me so much the day Mr. Boyer died,” I said, thinking that didn’t sound quite right. “I didn’t mean for you to scare me so much. Momma says I wasn’t nice to you when you needed me to be, so I hope you won’t be mad at me.”

Mrs. Boyer and my mother would forge a peculiar friendship. Though they rarely spoke to each other, it was commonly believed among the neighborhood’s gossip elite that they shared a bond no one else could understand. Except for the night her husband died, to my knowledge Mrs. Boyer never set foot in my parents’ house again, which suited me fine. Although I eventually gained a measure of compassion for the poor woman’s plight, ultimately I could see her only as the toothless hag who caused me to wet my pants.

.  .  .

In the spring of 1960, with a good deal of prompting from Mrs. Boyer, Dabbo and I decided to dig a vegetable garden. Two gardens, actually: one on either side of the chain-link fence separating our backyard from Mrs. Boyer’s, Dabbo digging on her side, I on ours.

Under the watchful eye of this still-scary lady, we put shovels, rakes, and hoes to use, and by mid-afternoon two rows of gooey black soil—“east Texas gumbo,” the locals called it—were eked out, mulched, and ready for planting.

Admiring our work, I remarked innocently to my mother, when she walked up to have a look, that I thought my row was prettier than Dabbo’s.

“Is not,” he said. Simultaneously, the hoe in his hand came down on the top of my head, splitting my scalp open.

All the sounds of a normal spring afternoon—chirpy chatter and the lazy traffic—silenced themselves, and Norvic Street suddenly seemed like a scene from that science-fiction movie
The Day the Earth Stood Still
.

My mother’s eyes commanded me to remain upright and conscious until she got to me. I cast a glance in Dabbo’s direction—an inquiry of sorts, to confirm if he’d actually just smashed me over the head with the sharp end of a garden hoe. And if so, why?

But his eyes were two television test patterns advertising the end of another broadcasting day; “The Star-Spangled Banner” had been played and the sign-off prayer delivered. No clues were forthcoming from my unpredictable little friend.

When my brain completed cross-referencing my reaction with Dabbo’s and my mother’s, it finally registered that the warm red sticky stuff on my left hand was my very own blood, and my scream could be heard in Beaumont. “He killed me with a brain concussion! He killed me with a brain concussion! Dabbo killed me with a brain concussion!”

He broke away and ran across the street, hiding under Mr. Carnew’s house until long after I returned from the emergency room with seven stitches in my head.

Old Mrs. Boyer enjoyed bountiful snap beans, black-eyed peas, and okra that fall. Dabbo and I were back in stride long before the stitches were removed, and of course Elaine and Jennifer paid special attention to the treatment of my wounds.

Spit-Shine Charlie and Grandma Katie

A
s a boy my favorite place in the world was my grandmother’s apron-covered lap. Her favorite place in the world was the tiny bedroom where she kept her Bible, a wicker rocking chair, and an old tube radio tuned to the hundred-thousand-watt radio station KXEG in Del Rio, Texas. Lost in the scent of her leather-covered Bible and the overheated transformers, we went places, met people, and saw things that would shape the remainder of our lives. Rocking on her lap and listening to a live Carter Family performance, I remember knowing for the first time that I was loved. In time I came to understand the nature of her love as being part of an even greater love, one that loved my grandmother for loving me.

One day I asked if she had anything to do with this God I’d been hearing about. Without pause or condescension she answered, “Why, yes, child, I do, but no more than you or your momma or a rank stranger on the street. Some say God’s sittin’ up in heaven mad as a hornet ’bout how we actin’ down here, but I don’t think he’s mad at all. Ain’t nobody mad coulda ever made somebody half as special as you.” She was the enlightened enchantress of my childhood. I was, and still am, very much in love with Grandma Katie.

All these years later, the smell of burning leaves often transports me to the tiny front yard on Avenue P, where on an autumn day in 1954 my grandmother buried me up to the neck in freshly fallen post-oak leaves. Like every great adult playmate, she knew the value of repetition and, for my pleasure alone, spent the entire afternoon re-raking leaves in an attempt to create the perfect pile. More than just that, she created the perfect day. Then, when the daylight and my interest in being buried alive began to wane, she raked the pile high one last time. “Why, I do believe a fine young man like you should do the honors,” she said, ceremoniously handing me a lit kitchen match.

From the blaze, sparks sprang like newborn shooting stars in reverse, defying gravity and rising far above our heads. A hoot owl on the telephone pole harrumphed his approval. Trees leaned in for a closer look. Houses kept a respectful distance. But the wind couldn’t resist the urge to see what it could do, hence more sparks. The pyromaniac in me today can be traced to the moment Grandma Katie passed me that match.

Before long, our roaring fire gave way to a smoldering glow and, eventually, the pitch-black darkness of another star-studded witching hour. It was, after all, Halloween season, when the blurred edges of blue shadows, the coolness of day’s end, and my encroaching bedtime normally put me in mind of ghosts and their attendant hobgoblins. Not on this evening. Backed by my grandmother’s fierce innocence, the chains of my four-year-old imagination refused to be rattled. To be well loved is to be free of the evil lurking around the next darkened corner. Every child should know that feeling.

Later on, after I’d played in the bathtub until my fingers and toes were nearly purple as prunes, she read me my favorite Uncle Remus story—the one where Br’er Rabbit gets in a jam with the Tar Baby. I was fast asleep before B’rer Fox could outline, for the hapless Br’er Bear, his plan to snare Br’er Rabbit. My life since has been an ongoing search for the stillness that marked the end of that one perfect day.

By the age of eleven or so, I found that the simple comings and goings of day-to-day life on Norvic Street often sent me into prolonged periods of goose-bumped reverie. The perpetual motion of jet-black garbage men, gliding from the bumpers of slow-rolling sanitation trucks and tossing trash cans high over their heads, worked on me like a hypnotic drug. Watching crossing guards, meter readers, carhops, and even the lunch-line ladies at the elementary school could send me into a trance lasting from two seconds to five minutes.

The most reliable source of mundane enchantment around Jacinto City at the time was Spit-Shine Charlie, the humpbacked man who shined shoes at Blassingame’s Barber Shop. Like my grandmother, he held me in thrall.

I fell into the habit of escaping the midsummer heat by sitting in that air-conditioned barbershop watching him shine shoes. Mr. Blassingame gave no indication he minded my loitering, and in fact made me feel welcome by allowing me to sweep up around the shop. Curly, the baldheaded second barber, called me Charlie’s shadow, and my idol called me “lil potner.” I was a member of the club.

Charlie’s physical attributes lay somewhere between a dwarfish Louis Armstrong and Toulouse Lautrec. Arriving daily in a natty bowler and redolent with Violet talcum powder, he was nineteenth century through and through, and for all I knew he was well over a hundred years old.

As if in defiance of his thwarted stature, his eyes surveyed the room like enormous brown-and-yellow searchlights, his crippled body just along for the ride. His right leg was five inches shorter than his left, a defect remedied with a pair of black high-top laceups, one of them platformed to compensate for the shortfall. In place of his right shoulder blade, a hump the size of a bowling ball topped off his list of afflictions without hindering his disposition.

God’s external gift to Charlie was his hands. He might’ve been five foot two, had he been able to stand up straight, but his hands belonged to someone who was six foot six. When he turned his long, graceful fore and middle fingers into a reverse
L
to put polish on a shoe, it was done with a maestro’s touch. When I asked why he put the polish on with his bare fingers, his brown eyes twinkled like jaundiced stars. “I likes to puts da shinola on thisaway; thataway I gets a feel for what he need. A man’s shoes be like a pretty gal; you gots to see whats they need fore you go puttin’ a shine to ’em.”

The finishing touch was the mainstay of Charlie’s livelihood. It started with a maneuver he called the over-under and sideways-down, a trick that required the use of two brushes and blinding hand speed. To say he took a brush in each hand falls well short of the truth. In the hundred-plus times I watched, I can’t recall seeing either hand ever touch a brush. Amid an appreciative chorus of oohs and aahs, he juggled, twirled, and flipped his brushes into the air while giving an old pair of shoes the first layer of a new shine.

This restoration was over when he whipped out his rag and started whistling “Chattanooga Choo Choo” or “Sweet Georgia Brown.” Charlie had perfected a method that combined whistling, spitting on the toes, buffing in the shine, and yanking off the rag with a flick of his wrist that popped it like a firecracker, each element timed strategically with four-bar intervals. Charlie did with his hands what tap dancers do with their feet. With his song completed, he’d roll back on his stool and let the man examine the results for himself. When the customer beamed his satisfaction, Charlie carefully painted each heel and sole with black liquid polish. Beginning to end, the process took less than six minutes.

In a quiet afternoon lull, Charlie motioned for me to come closer. “Shine costs two bits,” he said, nodding at his homemade kit, “but poppin’ da rag is where I gets my tips. I might whistle a tune and pop my rag, but I cain’t go lettin’ myself think I shinin’ better ’cause I’s a cripple and rollin’ on my stool down round his feet. Naw, suh, da good Lawd’s on my side much as the next man’s. It ain’t no differnt if a man be black or white, rich or po’. If he ain’t no good to hisself, ain’t no good for nobody else. That’s what I need my lil potner to remember one day when he thinks of Ole Shine dead an’ gone.”

Around age thirteen, I began drifting away from Charlie. As the sixties wore on, the barbershop became my least likely hangout. I dropped in from time to time, but a nervous interest in junior-high girls kept me from losing myself in Charlie’s artistry. I had lost the innocence that he retained.

One slow Saturday morning, Curly came to the house on Norvic Street to tell me Charlie had passed away. “He nodded off on his stool like we all seen him do,” he said, “only this time he didn’t wake up.” Allowing that he thought Charlie was “in a better place up yonder with two good legs, shinin’ shoes and whistlin’ up a storm,” the bald barber adopted the deferential tone old men use when death claims one of their peers. “Seein’s how he didn’t have a family or next of kin, we thought you’d be the one who ought to have this.” Tears crested but didn’t break on Curly’s lower eyelids as he handed me Spit-Shine Charlie’s shoeshine kit. “It’s what he would’ve wanted.”

Within a year and a half of each other, Grandma Katie and Spit-Shine Charlie died. It should go without saying that I loved my mother and father with the fierceness inherent in both the bloodlines from which I sprang. It is, however, this common blood that for nearly two decades kept me from experiencing the love of my parents as anything but a primal instinct for survival, theirs and mine. With my grandmother and Charlie, though, I experienced love as something tangible between myself and another human being. In the gently powerful presence of these two exceptional souls, love was made easy for my understanding. Love was the source of their ability to mesmerize me so completely.

Their deaths triggered a prolonged period of muted loneliness that lasted until the birth of my children. And with the arrival of each of my daughters, the ability to love without expectation came bubbling slowly from the forgotten depths of who I was when I first crawled up in my grandmother’s lap. Thanks to the abused wife of a sharecrop farmer, a crippled shoeshine man, and four little girls, I was able to emerge from the dark forest of an angry heart into the light of love that will forever exist between my parents and me.